Jared apologising for besmirching the good name of obese West Virginians was highly reminiscent of a wokester apologising for being too truthful about a minority group. Instead of holding people to standards and telling the truth you prioritise racial loyalty/political ideology. Sad!
There are a lot of not so bright ‘white nationalist’ to be fair, but there are also lots of dumb liberals and leftists too. Most average libs don’t read The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books. Most liberals are midwits who follow The Young Turks or Rachel Maddow.
Most white nationalists or Identitarians aren’t religious and don’t glorify ‘proles’ or people involved in self-destructive or dysfunctional lifestyles. On the other hand, many are not rather nasty, vicious elitists like Hanania who have zero gratitude for people who keep his toilets unclogged, roads clear of debris, and ensure he and his family can find adequate provisions at their local grocery store. No, they aren’t at all egalitarians but simply think everyone within their particular place has a place with dignity regardless of credentials or social position and makes contributions in their own way. Many also think that fast-talking lawyers, hedge fund managers, or corporate executives aren’t inherently better or superior to someone maintaining roads, sanitation, or ensuring Richard gets his nice cup of coffee in the morning.
RH doesn’t mind psychologizing other people, so he is fair game too. My guess is that, as an Arab, he would prefer to be judged by his genotype (EHC!) than his phenotype. People on the receiving end of racism are more likely to hate it, so he’s an anti-racist and dishes out the usual whiny liberal pablum on that subject. However, I think he does appreciate the people who clean his toilets. In fact, he thinks open borders is humane because it will rescue billions from poverty. What he doesn’t like is whites who whine about working at Panda Express (aka “losers”) when others live lives of destitution in Africa. I agree with him on that. But I also see nothing wrong with whites lamenting the loss of their homeland—it’s a kind of “consumer good” and has economic value. But the funny thing is that the same RH who complains about stupid whites wants to turn the whole of the U.S. into West Virginia (and worse!) in terms of average IQ.
Viewing people who work at Panda Express as ‘losers’ is the problem. They aren’t at all. Not everyone can be a stock broker or attorney. We need a division of labor. The comparison with ‘poor Africans’ is irrelevant too. A proper nationalist or identitarian sees these people as fellow countrymen and part of the nation while a libertarian who only sees s nation as an economic zone/gdp views those in menial positions that way.
I’d rather have reasonably content and compensated white teenagers or college kids working at Panda Express than 40 year old Guatemalan grandmothers or Pakistanis fresh off the plane. Mr. Hoste/Hansnia beams with fragile class superiority upon viewing these people but there’s a high price for ‘vibrancy’ and one day Richard or one of his family members might contract food poisoning or some nasty bug because Ali or Juanita didn’t properly sanitize their hands after using the toilet.
EHC types would starve without those ‘proles’ who keep things going and clean up the streets and places they shop and dine. What Hanania needs most is a sense of gratitude.
What makes you think he doesn’t have gratitude? He is mainly annoyed by MAGA because they are nationalistic, racist, anti-free trade, anti-foreigner, etc.
MAGA is only the beginning of a political and class realignment in the U.S. Trump is the current representative of this growing political and social tendency but will soon pass from the scene as he will likely serve no more than this coming term and he’s pushing 80.
Being nationalistic and ‘anti-foreigner,’ or foreigner skeptic is a good thing though not something to decry like some liberal shrinking violet. He obviously has Zero gratitude coupled with a huge sense of entitlement. Free trade is another scam that has only increased poverty and mass immigration.
I see no lack of gratitude and no sense of entitlement. If anything, it is MAGA that has a sense of entitlement—they often want their jobs protected at the expense of other Americans. Free trade does not impoverish; it enriches. The US is one big free trade zone. If Texas became a separate country, would you suddenly want impose tariffs? Yes, free trade does cause economic dislocation but this need not be permanent.
You’re either blind or we see different things. You need to read more of Richard’s articles pining for the good old days of The Gilded Age when the trash knew their place and bowed and doffed their hats to passing plutocrats. Free trade impoverishes the nation as a whole not just segments of the workforce it may impact. It destroys whole communities and regions of the country which ideologues such as yourself patently ignore or gloss over. All ‘free trade’ does is concentrate wealth and fewer hands and lowers living standards. I’m not a libertarian so you’ll be wasting your precious time preaching your economic religion to me.
It is permanent and has been for 50 years. It is an economic race to the bottom. ‘Always low prices’ aka always low wages, destruction of communities and families. Harm to the common good.
I think that the argument that nationalists make is that poor and dull whites are closer to them genetically than poor and dull members of other races are. This is similar to Anatoly Karlin previously saying that nationalism is based on something real (genes, similar to familial relationships) whereas patriotism, in his own opinion, is completely fake and based on a piece of paper.
Yes, physical markers are among the easiest to observe or even manufacture—thankfully, for most of us, this now involves just using clothes, although some still prefer tattoos and elaborate piercings. Moreover, in clothing and tattoos, there is an ever-increasing sophistication, allowing the avant-garde to differentiate themselves from the posers. Ideas and beliefs are, in many ways, better because they actually force us to commit to something, like freedom of x, y, and z. However, even in culture, we can see status games played out in increasingly sophisticated and peculiar sects.
To be fair, Yeah, humans can't be neatly divided into separate races, just like with various colors. There are gradients, after all, and any separation line will be arbitrary. This is why Karlin, prior to his open borders conversion, also considered Ukrainians and Belarusians to be Russians, for instance, and why he was also willing to accept white immigrants from throughout the world who were willing to culturally Russify.
Tribalism always beats atomistic individualism. Look who is promoting such ideas on ‘the right’ and take into consideration their social, ethnic, and psychological backgrounds, and what their particular motivations might be. The fact is, Richard ‘Hoste’ was motivated by intellectual elitism and resentment at possibly being bullied by blacks as a youngster in Chicago at some point or as a result of some negative social interaction with them. Our young world-be racialist wasn’t motivated by anything positive such as love or loyalty towards a specific people, culture, civilization. It is important to keep this in mind when debunking and dissecting Mr. Hanania. Autism is also clearly a factor and there is a disproportionate percentage of such people within the Alt/Dissident Right.
Smart people take care of their families, even the dumber ones, and prefer people like themselves within high-trust societies.
Richard himself apparently has some troubled relatives if certain news reports from the Chicago area about 7 years ago are at all accurate and doubt he has severed ties with that individual based on his being ‘low human capital.’ Blood is always thicker than water.
If someone follows the law, stays off of welfare, and feeds their family, then they're upstanding members of society regardless of race. There's no point in insulting people from west virginia just because they don't have a college degree or whatever.
“… obese Appalachians who put Mountain Dew in the bottles of their babies” is a bit harsh, don’t you think? When my sister was dying of metastatic cancer in Newland, North Carolina, I spent many weeks with her during various stages of her illness. I live in Los Angeles, and before that I lived in New York City. I graduated from Yale and subsequently with an M.Phil in sociology from Columbia University. Because my sister was seriously into TM, I had to spend many hours outside of her apartment so that she could meditate in peace. I began to work out at the local gym, which consisted of a building built during the depression with a basketball court on the ground floor and rusted out free weights on the second floor. Working out there as a 75-year-old, I actually made friends with a lot of the local kids. They were indeed “LHC,” but they were astonishingly fun to hang out with and were pretty much as adept at trash talk as was I. The only wrinkle was that occasionally the manager who had a small office on the ground floor had to send up a message cautioning me not to swear, since in this Bible town that was breaking a serious norm in a city-owned building. My other escape from the apartment was to go to Wednesday night Bible study at various Baptist Churches in the town. Once again, although perhaps not meeting Yale seminar standards, these discussions displayed hugely impressive knowledge of biblical passages, and often included announcements that so-and-so needed food to be brought to his home after having recently been released from hospital. Newland is for sure an “LHC bastion,” but it scores very high in my mind in terms of other metrics, metrics that put Los Angeles, and Yale, to shame.
I think JT's sentiments make sense if you view your racial group as an extended family. After all, most of us feel we should stick by family members no matter how rubbish they are. Yet I find it hard to feel affection for even my first cousins, let alone for some random white stranger.
I think it all boils down to who you consider to be 'of your tribe', which for me means 'people like me'. I think Jared might concede that his Japanese friends are more his kind of people than fat, uneducated Appalachians, but you are stuck with the 'family' you are born into.
That isn't how I feel but even so, I too was happier in my English Midland city when whites comprised 99% of the population. We are now down to 30%. Perhaps it's all a question of who that other 70% is and I can assure you that they aren't all doctors and pharmacists, despite what the BBC might say.
That's certainly what conservatives say, and I AM a conservative. Yet, I'm not wholly convinced by the idea of expanding concentric circles. I have spent a lot of time in Japan and feel closer to the Japanese than I do to say, Slovenians. Therefore the idea of feeling bonds to those who are genetically closest to you can at best be only part of the story.
Steve Sailer is a conservative who is adopted, and says he feels closer to his adopted family than any unknown biological kin (although he says he thought differently as a teen).
Ah, I didn't know that about Steve Sailer. Interesting. So where does that leave 'The more extended the family gets, the more diminished the tie'? Does that relate to any kind of family structure rather than being a law of biology?
It's a fact about limitations. In physics there are multiple laws about a force diminishing with the square of the distance, and this is related to the surface area of a sphere with that radius. The same intensity cannot be maintained when spread out more widely.
There are socially constructed aspects to such things. Clannish societies (often with more inbreeding) feature loyalty to one's extended family over the rest of society. HBDChick has written a lot about how in the west (west of Hajnal's line specifically) clans were broken up by more intermarriage across clans to form smaller nuclear families, and this permitted more loyalty up at the level of society.
There is a kind of horseshoe going on here where woke leftists and white identitarians like Jared both seem to want to bring whites down to level of other ethnic groups. One side does it by trying to fight “white supremacy” & aiming for equal outcomes among groups, while the other does it by encouraging whites to be as ethnocentric as other groups are.
Ironically it is mainstream centrist elites that seem to understand best that certain practices that were historically invented & promoted by whites (liberal democracy, meritocracy, the scientific method) are actually superior ways of doing things and not just particular cultural practices that an ethnonationalist would want to conserve. It’s just that they also understand that saying that these practices are “white” makes it less likely that other groups (or other countries if we’re thinking internationally) will adopt them.
EHC understands that the most effective way of spreading the gospel of white culture is by dropping the “white” part and emphasizing the universal appeal of their ideas instead.
I mean, I have no problem with a colorblind meritocracy. In principle you could attract the best people from around the world. You could even try to build our country into a master race from diverse roots that would have horrified Hitler.
But in the current world, ethnicity is a great way to polarize people, we have two political parties that thrive on polarization and want to discourage coalition-building across the line, people favor their own, and you have a DEI bureaucracy that's diminishing now but likely to boom under the next Democratic administration dedicated to dispossessing whites and men.
Also, in the newest generations, whites are a minority, and other groups are organized already. So it would make sense for whites to organize to defend their collective interests. Even more-successful groups like Asians and Jews (to the extent they identify as such) will do that, since being a wealthier-than-average minority is dangerous (ask the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, or the Jews in Germany).
I'm not sure liberal democracy is all that great overall given the past few decades, but I trust any American Caesar even less. The Chinese have more or less figured out how to run a bureaucratic government over 2000 years, if they want to keep doing what they're doing I wouldn't be surprised. But here..? Nah, let's keep doing what we're doing. It's our culture and we're pretty successful as a country, and I doubt Yarvin's or Hoppe's figured out something better.
No, meritocracy, democracy and even basic liberalism can only work within high-trust, homogenous communities. Once you introduce too many disparate and parasitic elements, the whole thing falls apart.
The fact that whites are still on average better than others at practicing liberal democracy & meritocracy doesn’t contradict the point I was making, indeed it is part of the premise. On the other hand you seem to imply that whites should abandon meritocracy in favor of ethnocentrism in order to stop getting screwed over, perfectly illustrating the horseshoe that I referred to.
Most white people are doing fine and don’t think that they are being screwed over. The fact that a minority of resentful losers do is perfectly in line with what Richard is saying. And my point was that any white person who thinks like this is arguably less “white” from a cultural and political point of view and is instead emulating the behavior of ethnic groups that they supposedly look down on.
Jared is right that people do feel some degree of racial affinity, but Richard is MORE correct that ultimately economics and class matter more. If you're a white Stanford CS grad, you'll have more in common with an Indian of the same vintage. If you're part of the EHC, then you already know firsthand what the social graphs of under-40 EHC look like today, but it's not obvious to your typical white identitarian outsider...until JD Vance.
If a hillbilly catapulted into Yale Law and venture capital would marry an Indian woman from the world of EHC, rather than a sweetheart hillbilly back home, then it means the notion of an "extended racial family" has very little allure for the elites.
The EHC are naturally post-racial: The strong leave the family to seek their destiny. The weak stay close to family to seek protection. Which is why wokeness is so poisonous to competence and excellence: It infected the EHC with the identarian politics of the LHC. If you're a white EHC jaded and displaced by anti-white discrimination, there is a battle for your soul between Peter Thiel's vs Jared Taylor's vision of the future.
RH supports the ethnostate of Israel because of a special carve out due to the history of vicious anti-Semitism among whites/Arabs. But isn’t the solution to the Jewish problem to just have them blend in with whites or other races? Yet, I would bet that he wants the Jews to survive as an ethnically distinct people even if they weren’t in danger (and that includes low[er] IQ Jews too). Imagine him writing, “I don’t care if the Jewish people slowly disappear.” But when it comes to whites, he apparently thinks of them as nothing more than skin suits. It’s true that he isn’t openly hostile to whites but he does seem to take perverse delight in calling MAGA stupid (more so than blacks) and is certainly more drawn to whites who don’t care if they disappear. He takes this anti-racist stance of “cuckoo” whites to be the morally superior position. (Interestingly, so do many Jews even though they want Jews to survive as a group.) Maybe whites should become “Zionists”.
He can both think that Jews in the US should blend in, and that Jews in Israel should resist the neighboring Arabs. Because the US and Israel are both better than their neighbors, and this acts in favor of a high-quality state.
Yes, RH could support both those aims but I doubt he supports Israel to the extent he does simply because Israelis are better than their neighbors and just happen to be Jews. Zionism is about the survival of Jews as an ethnic group and he likely supports that goal. Although I don’t think he is secretly delighted at the idea of whites becoming a minority, he doesn’t care because to him phenotype is “superficial”. But he would never criticize a woman for preferring a tall man to a short man. On the contrary, he would call a man who complained about being rejected for a “superficial” trait like height a “loser”. Because he is oblivious to the philosophical inconsistency. But he will cite the mentally unhealthy Ayn Rand who was an anti-racist Zionist who used Aryan protagonists in her fiction.
So...she's Jewish and liked to fantasize about blond white people? Something wrong with either of those? Lady was a sub who wrote big Russian-style novels, at least some people seem to like them. (I barely got through The Fountainhead.) Lots of Jewish guys going after Asian chicks these days, and that one actually has some cultural similarity behind it.
You seem to see everything as a Manichean struggle between Jews and whites and their proxies. I don't think Hanania is really that invested one way or the other. The guy is first and foremost a cognitive elitist, and he's annoyed at both the woke schoolmarms and the downscale MAGA people (who are increasingly ethnically diverse). You could well argue a country owes something to all its citizens, even the less capable ones, and I'm for a bigger welfare state (at least national health insurance and a higher minimum wage) for largely that reason, paid for by higher taxes, even if it makes the country less dynamic.
But 'white nationalists' are a distinct group, and indeed a small, not particularly popular subgroup, of white Americans in general. You can dislike one and not the other.
I said nothing about a struggle between Jews and whites. I am only pointing out the hypocrisy of defending the survival of Jews as a distinct ethnic group while viewing whites as nothing more than skin suits. It’s really that simple.
I believe this was the strategy for many up to around the middle of the 20th Century. Guess how well it worked.
MAGA being stupid is a statement of fact which has nothing to do with race. Hence why DJT's biggest gains have been among dumb chudoid nonwhite males. His black male convict polling numbers are actually downright respectable for a post-'64 Republican. Presumably they think they too can swing a Lil Waynesque pardon if they get themselves a rap hit and promise to support him.
There are different degrees of assimilation. Jews did not seek to disappear themselves entirely by genetically blending with gentiles. You can assimilate and still remain ethnically/culturally apart by choice. RH has no problem with Jews who want to remain a majority in Israel but he does have a problem with whites who want to remain a majority in their homelands. My view is that it is not immoral to reject alien phenotypes.
I think most people are kulaks. I think the losers will murder you for having two cows. And I think the elites despise you for caring more about keeping your two cows than you do about the theoretical spoils of their grand plans. Call me militant middle class I suppose. Parochial and bourgeois.
My deeper point is that America being set up by Puritans and Quakers who were opposed to hierarchy, aristocracy and a state church has made any form of conservatism much weaker. There is no natural order or right path they can support so they resort to praising ordinary people.
Even in France which has been a republic for 150 years, monarchists provide a structure, the current cabinet has two monarchist ministers.
At a psychological level snobbery is unhealthy part of political structure but it is probably better than unstructured hate, xenophobia or odes to fake folk feeling at building healthy political movements with good immunity against undesirable recruits.
Conservatism is resistance to change. (That doesn't make it wrong necessarily; change can be very bad or stupid.) The US, as you say, came into being from anti-monarchist dissenters so we don't have a 'throne and altar' conservative tradition.
To even raise issues related to race is to be immediately accused of racism. What the fuck, here goes anyway.
It’s far past time for society to quit pandering to the black community and to demand that it take the lead in correcting the problems it faces. Here are a few suggestions.
There is a systematic lack of respect for education within the community. Tolerance of disruptive students by black school administrators and lack of effective discipline hinders learning in many black majority schools, stifling students’ potential achievement. The simple answer is to expel repeat offenders so that those who desire to learn can learn.
There is a casual acceptance of criminal behavior within the black community that results in a failure to cooperate with police in solving crimes. Until this is reversed there will be zero economic development within areas where they live.
Finally, someone must find a way to make black fathers love and care for their children and especially their boy children. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate fifty times higher than the average American. The lack of a father’s involvement in raising their sons is at the heart of this problem yet no one acknowledges it and seeks answers to it. Where the hell are the black men (and especially black politicians) who even publicly acknowledge this problem? What are they waiting for?
It’s an interesting article, Richard, that you’ve written.
I recently watched a podcast of Barack Obama talking to three retired nfl players. The podcast is called “the pivot”. I’m sure I can pinpoint it if you’d like.
BHO points out that what keeps African Americans grounded is that, no matter how successful they are as individuals, there are people that they love who are struggling to get by.
I am not sure if this is true. All three players nodded in agreement. You get the sense that all of them have carried a number of poorer relations over the years.
Maybe this is the kind of solidarity that happens when blood ties connect the “elite human capital” with the “low human capital”.
> They don’t read and are often religious, though more in a tribal than a truly spiritual sense. The world is frightening to them, and they are hostile to liberals and minorities because they represent uncertainty and change.
I think many people across the political, intellectual, and intelligence spectrum feel that way at times, except perhaps when it comes to reading—though TikTok seems to be influencing young minds everywhere. At best, intelligence can help us cope and guide us through. At worst, it can help justify those feelings and intuitions. It’s interesting to consider what leads some of the most deranged and dangerous intellectuals, on both the right and the left, down this path, while others, hopefully, just bounce around through the turbulence and eventually find their way to smooth gliding.
Jared apologising for besmirching the good name of obese West Virginians was highly reminiscent of a wokester apologising for being too truthful about a minority group. Instead of holding people to standards and telling the truth you prioritise racial loyalty/political ideology. Sad!
There are a lot of not so bright ‘white nationalist’ to be fair, but there are also lots of dumb liberals and leftists too. Most average libs don’t read The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books. Most liberals are midwits who follow The Young Turks or Rachel Maddow.
Most white nationalists or Identitarians aren’t religious and don’t glorify ‘proles’ or people involved in self-destructive or dysfunctional lifestyles. On the other hand, many are not rather nasty, vicious elitists like Hanania who have zero gratitude for people who keep his toilets unclogged, roads clear of debris, and ensure he and his family can find adequate provisions at their local grocery store. No, they aren’t at all egalitarians but simply think everyone within their particular place has a place with dignity regardless of credentials or social position and makes contributions in their own way. Many also think that fast-talking lawyers, hedge fund managers, or corporate executives aren’t inherently better or superior to someone maintaining roads, sanitation, or ensuring Richard gets his nice cup of coffee in the morning.
RH doesn’t mind psychologizing other people, so he is fair game too. My guess is that, as an Arab, he would prefer to be judged by his genotype (EHC!) than his phenotype. People on the receiving end of racism are more likely to hate it, so he’s an anti-racist and dishes out the usual whiny liberal pablum on that subject. However, I think he does appreciate the people who clean his toilets. In fact, he thinks open borders is humane because it will rescue billions from poverty. What he doesn’t like is whites who whine about working at Panda Express (aka “losers”) when others live lives of destitution in Africa. I agree with him on that. But I also see nothing wrong with whites lamenting the loss of their homeland—it’s a kind of “consumer good” and has economic value. But the funny thing is that the same RH who complains about stupid whites wants to turn the whole of the U.S. into West Virginia (and worse!) in terms of average IQ.
Viewing people who work at Panda Express as ‘losers’ is the problem. They aren’t at all. Not everyone can be a stock broker or attorney. We need a division of labor. The comparison with ‘poor Africans’ is irrelevant too. A proper nationalist or identitarian sees these people as fellow countrymen and part of the nation while a libertarian who only sees s nation as an economic zone/gdp views those in menial positions that way.
Forgive me for the NAXALT, but there are libertarians who reject open borders.
And get mobbed by purists that they’re not real libertarians.
Milton Friedman did. Tyler Cowen claims to.
Very few.
That’s true but the point here is that these libertarians have better arguments that might catch on, so libertarianism per se is not the problem.
I’d rather have reasonably content and compensated white teenagers or college kids working at Panda Express than 40 year old Guatemalan grandmothers or Pakistanis fresh off the plane. Mr. Hoste/Hansnia beams with fragile class superiority upon viewing these people but there’s a high price for ‘vibrancy’ and one day Richard or one of his family members might contract food poisoning or some nasty bug because Ali or Juanita didn’t properly sanitize their hands after using the toilet.
EHC types would starve without those ‘proles’ who keep things going and clean up the streets and places they shop and dine. What Hanania needs most is a sense of gratitude.
What makes you think he doesn’t have gratitude? He is mainly annoyed by MAGA because they are nationalistic, racist, anti-free trade, anti-foreigner, etc.
MAGA is only the beginning of a political and class realignment in the U.S. Trump is the current representative of this growing political and social tendency but will soon pass from the scene as he will likely serve no more than this coming term and he’s pushing 80.
Being nationalistic and ‘anti-foreigner,’ or foreigner skeptic is a good thing though not something to decry like some liberal shrinking violet. He obviously has Zero gratitude coupled with a huge sense of entitlement. Free trade is another scam that has only increased poverty and mass immigration.
I see no lack of gratitude and no sense of entitlement. If anything, it is MAGA that has a sense of entitlement—they often want their jobs protected at the expense of other Americans. Free trade does not impoverish; it enriches. The US is one big free trade zone. If Texas became a separate country, would you suddenly want impose tariffs? Yes, free trade does cause economic dislocation but this need not be permanent.
You’re either blind or we see different things. You need to read more of Richard’s articles pining for the good old days of The Gilded Age when the trash knew their place and bowed and doffed their hats to passing plutocrats. Free trade impoverishes the nation as a whole not just segments of the workforce it may impact. It destroys whole communities and regions of the country which ideologues such as yourself patently ignore or gloss over. All ‘free trade’ does is concentrate wealth and fewer hands and lowers living standards. I’m not a libertarian so you’ll be wasting your precious time preaching your economic religion to me.
It is permanent and has been for 50 years. It is an economic race to the bottom. ‘Always low prices’ aka always low wages, destruction of communities and families. Harm to the common good.
Ha going ad hominem are we......gonna weaken the argument, if there is one. Nice
That's how you should expect someone to respond to an article with ad hominems in it.
I think that the argument that nationalists make is that poor and dull whites are closer to them genetically than poor and dull members of other races are. This is similar to Anatoly Karlin previously saying that nationalism is based on something real (genes, similar to familial relationships) whereas patriotism, in his own opinion, is completely fake and based on a piece of paper.
Karlin's error is thinking that social constructs are not real. The social relationships embodied by the piece of paper are just as real as genes.
"Money and nation-states are both social constructs but that doesn't mean you can just not pay your taxes."
https://x.com/RogueWPA/status/1681896353453182978
Humans are genetically predisposed to tribal abstractions.
Perhaps, but there's no evidence that we necessarily react more to the tribe of "race" than that of "nation" or "soccer team."
Yes, physical markers are among the easiest to observe or even manufacture—thankfully, for most of us, this now involves just using clothes, although some still prefer tattoos and elaborate piercings. Moreover, in clothing and tattoos, there is an ever-increasing sophistication, allowing the avant-garde to differentiate themselves from the posers. Ideas and beliefs are, in many ways, better because they actually force us to commit to something, like freedom of x, y, and z. However, even in culture, we can see status games played out in increasingly sophisticated and peculiar sects.
To be fair, Yeah, humans can't be neatly divided into separate races, just like with various colors. There are gradients, after all, and any separation line will be arbitrary. This is why Karlin, prior to his open borders conversion, also considered Ukrainians and Belarusians to be Russians, for instance, and why he was also willing to accept white immigrants from throughout the world who were willing to culturally Russify.
Tribalism always beats atomistic individualism. Look who is promoting such ideas on ‘the right’ and take into consideration their social, ethnic, and psychological backgrounds, and what their particular motivations might be. The fact is, Richard ‘Hoste’ was motivated by intellectual elitism and resentment at possibly being bullied by blacks as a youngster in Chicago at some point or as a result of some negative social interaction with them. Our young world-be racialist wasn’t motivated by anything positive such as love or loyalty towards a specific people, culture, civilization. It is important to keep this in mind when debunking and dissecting Mr. Hanania. Autism is also clearly a factor and there is a disproportionate percentage of such people within the Alt/Dissident Right.
Smart people take care of their families, even the dumber ones, and prefer people like themselves within high-trust societies.
Richard himself apparently has some troubled relatives if certain news reports from the Chicago area about 7 years ago are at all accurate and doubt he has severed ties with that individual based on his being ‘low human capital.’ Blood is always thicker than water.
If someone follows the law, stays off of welfare, and feeds their family, then they're upstanding members of society regardless of race. There's no point in insulting people from west virginia just because they don't have a college degree or whatever.
“… obese Appalachians who put Mountain Dew in the bottles of their babies” is a bit harsh, don’t you think? When my sister was dying of metastatic cancer in Newland, North Carolina, I spent many weeks with her during various stages of her illness. I live in Los Angeles, and before that I lived in New York City. I graduated from Yale and subsequently with an M.Phil in sociology from Columbia University. Because my sister was seriously into TM, I had to spend many hours outside of her apartment so that she could meditate in peace. I began to work out at the local gym, which consisted of a building built during the depression with a basketball court on the ground floor and rusted out free weights on the second floor. Working out there as a 75-year-old, I actually made friends with a lot of the local kids. They were indeed “LHC,” but they were astonishingly fun to hang out with and were pretty much as adept at trash talk as was I. The only wrinkle was that occasionally the manager who had a small office on the ground floor had to send up a message cautioning me not to swear, since in this Bible town that was breaking a serious norm in a city-owned building. My other escape from the apartment was to go to Wednesday night Bible study at various Baptist Churches in the town. Once again, although perhaps not meeting Yale seminar standards, these discussions displayed hugely impressive knowledge of biblical passages, and often included announcements that so-and-so needed food to be brought to his home after having recently been released from hospital. Newland is for sure an “LHC bastion,” but it scores very high in my mind in terms of other metrics, metrics that put Los Angeles, and Yale, to shame.
I think JT's sentiments make sense if you view your racial group as an extended family. After all, most of us feel we should stick by family members no matter how rubbish they are. Yet I find it hard to feel affection for even my first cousins, let alone for some random white stranger.
I think it all boils down to who you consider to be 'of your tribe', which for me means 'people like me'. I think Jared might concede that his Japanese friends are more his kind of people than fat, uneducated Appalachians, but you are stuck with the 'family' you are born into.
That isn't how I feel but even so, I too was happier in my English Midland city when whites comprised 99% of the population. We are now down to 30%. Perhaps it's all a question of who that other 70% is and I can assure you that they aren't all doctors and pharmacists, despite what the BBC might say.
The more extended the family gets, the more diminished the tie.
That's certainly what conservatives say, and I AM a conservative. Yet, I'm not wholly convinced by the idea of expanding concentric circles. I have spent a lot of time in Japan and feel closer to the Japanese than I do to say, Slovenians. Therefore the idea of feeling bonds to those who are genetically closest to you can at best be only part of the story.
Steve Sailer is a conservative who is adopted, and says he feels closer to his adopted family than any unknown biological kin (although he says he thought differently as a teen).
Ah, I didn't know that about Steve Sailer. Interesting. So where does that leave 'The more extended the family gets, the more diminished the tie'? Does that relate to any kind of family structure rather than being a law of biology?
It's a fact about limitations. In physics there are multiple laws about a force diminishing with the square of the distance, and this is related to the surface area of a sphere with that radius. The same intensity cannot be maintained when spread out more widely.
There are socially constructed aspects to such things. Clannish societies (often with more inbreeding) feature loyalty to one's extended family over the rest of society. HBDChick has written a lot about how in the west (west of Hajnal's line specifically) clans were broken up by more intermarriage across clans to form smaller nuclear families, and this permitted more loyalty up at the level of society.
There is a kind of horseshoe going on here where woke leftists and white identitarians like Jared both seem to want to bring whites down to level of other ethnic groups. One side does it by trying to fight “white supremacy” & aiming for equal outcomes among groups, while the other does it by encouraging whites to be as ethnocentric as other groups are.
Ironically it is mainstream centrist elites that seem to understand best that certain practices that were historically invented & promoted by whites (liberal democracy, meritocracy, the scientific method) are actually superior ways of doing things and not just particular cultural practices that an ethnonationalist would want to conserve. It’s just that they also understand that saying that these practices are “white” makes it less likely that other groups (or other countries if we’re thinking internationally) will adopt them.
EHC understands that the most effective way of spreading the gospel of white culture is by dropping the “white” part and emphasizing the universal appeal of their ideas instead.
I mean, I have no problem with a colorblind meritocracy. In principle you could attract the best people from around the world. You could even try to build our country into a master race from diverse roots that would have horrified Hitler.
But in the current world, ethnicity is a great way to polarize people, we have two political parties that thrive on polarization and want to discourage coalition-building across the line, people favor their own, and you have a DEI bureaucracy that's diminishing now but likely to boom under the next Democratic administration dedicated to dispossessing whites and men.
Also, in the newest generations, whites are a minority, and other groups are organized already. So it would make sense for whites to organize to defend their collective interests. Even more-successful groups like Asians and Jews (to the extent they identify as such) will do that, since being a wealthier-than-average minority is dangerous (ask the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, or the Jews in Germany).
I'm not sure liberal democracy is all that great overall given the past few decades, but I trust any American Caesar even less. The Chinese have more or less figured out how to run a bureaucratic government over 2000 years, if they want to keep doing what they're doing I wouldn't be surprised. But here..? Nah, let's keep doing what we're doing. It's our culture and we're pretty successful as a country, and I doubt Yarvin's or Hoppe's figured out something better.
No, meritocracy, democracy and even basic liberalism can only work within high-trust, homogenous communities. Once you introduce too many disparate and parasitic elements, the whole thing falls apart.
The fact that whites are still on average better than others at practicing liberal democracy & meritocracy doesn’t contradict the point I was making, indeed it is part of the premise. On the other hand you seem to imply that whites should abandon meritocracy in favor of ethnocentrism in order to stop getting screwed over, perfectly illustrating the horseshoe that I referred to.
Most white people are doing fine and don’t think that they are being screwed over. The fact that a minority of resentful losers do is perfectly in line with what Richard is saying. And my point was that any white person who thinks like this is arguably less “white” from a cultural and political point of view and is instead emulating the behavior of ethnic groups that they supposedly look down on.
Jared is right that people do feel some degree of racial affinity, but Richard is MORE correct that ultimately economics and class matter more. If you're a white Stanford CS grad, you'll have more in common with an Indian of the same vintage. If you're part of the EHC, then you already know firsthand what the social graphs of under-40 EHC look like today, but it's not obvious to your typical white identitarian outsider...until JD Vance.
If a hillbilly catapulted into Yale Law and venture capital would marry an Indian woman from the world of EHC, rather than a sweetheart hillbilly back home, then it means the notion of an "extended racial family" has very little allure for the elites.
The EHC are naturally post-racial: The strong leave the family to seek their destiny. The weak stay close to family to seek protection. Which is why wokeness is so poisonous to competence and excellence: It infected the EHC with the identarian politics of the LHC. If you're a white EHC jaded and displaced by anti-white discrimination, there is a battle for your soul between Peter Thiel's vs Jared Taylor's vision of the future.
RH supports the ethnostate of Israel because of a special carve out due to the history of vicious anti-Semitism among whites/Arabs. But isn’t the solution to the Jewish problem to just have them blend in with whites or other races? Yet, I would bet that he wants the Jews to survive as an ethnically distinct people even if they weren’t in danger (and that includes low[er] IQ Jews too). Imagine him writing, “I don’t care if the Jewish people slowly disappear.” But when it comes to whites, he apparently thinks of them as nothing more than skin suits. It’s true that he isn’t openly hostile to whites but he does seem to take perverse delight in calling MAGA stupid (more so than blacks) and is certainly more drawn to whites who don’t care if they disappear. He takes this anti-racist stance of “cuckoo” whites to be the morally superior position. (Interestingly, so do many Jews even though they want Jews to survive as a group.) Maybe whites should become “Zionists”.
He can both think that Jews in the US should blend in, and that Jews in Israel should resist the neighboring Arabs. Because the US and Israel are both better than their neighbors, and this acts in favor of a high-quality state.
Yes, RH could support both those aims but I doubt he supports Israel to the extent he does simply because Israelis are better than their neighbors and just happen to be Jews. Zionism is about the survival of Jews as an ethnic group and he likely supports that goal. Although I don’t think he is secretly delighted at the idea of whites becoming a minority, he doesn’t care because to him phenotype is “superficial”. But he would never criticize a woman for preferring a tall man to a short man. On the contrary, he would call a man who complained about being rejected for a “superficial” trait like height a “loser”. Because he is oblivious to the philosophical inconsistency. But he will cite the mentally unhealthy Ayn Rand who was an anti-racist Zionist who used Aryan protagonists in her fiction.
So...she's Jewish and liked to fantasize about blond white people? Something wrong with either of those? Lady was a sub who wrote big Russian-style novels, at least some people seem to like them. (I barely got through The Fountainhead.) Lots of Jewish guys going after Asian chicks these days, and that one actually has some cultural similarity behind it.
That comment misses my main point entirely. My comment about Rand was just an aside.
You seem to see everything as a Manichean struggle between Jews and whites and their proxies. I don't think Hanania is really that invested one way or the other. The guy is first and foremost a cognitive elitist, and he's annoyed at both the woke schoolmarms and the downscale MAGA people (who are increasingly ethnically diverse). You could well argue a country owes something to all its citizens, even the less capable ones, and I'm for a bigger welfare state (at least national health insurance and a higher minimum wage) for largely that reason, paid for by higher taxes, even if it makes the country less dynamic.
But 'white nationalists' are a distinct group, and indeed a small, not particularly popular subgroup, of white Americans in general. You can dislike one and not the other.
I said nothing about a struggle between Jews and whites. I am only pointing out the hypocrisy of defending the survival of Jews as a distinct ethnic group while viewing whites as nothing more than skin suits. It’s really that simple.
>Just have them blend in?
I believe this was the strategy for many up to around the middle of the 20th Century. Guess how well it worked.
MAGA being stupid is a statement of fact which has nothing to do with race. Hence why DJT's biggest gains have been among dumb chudoid nonwhite males. His black male convict polling numbers are actually downright respectable for a post-'64 Republican. Presumably they think they too can swing a Lil Waynesque pardon if they get themselves a rap hit and promise to support him.
There are different degrees of assimilation. Jews did not seek to disappear themselves entirely by genetically blending with gentiles. You can assimilate and still remain ethnically/culturally apart by choice. RH has no problem with Jews who want to remain a majority in Israel but he does have a problem with whites who want to remain a majority in their homelands. My view is that it is not immoral to reject alien phenotypes.
I think most people are kulaks. I think the losers will murder you for having two cows. And I think the elites despise you for caring more about keeping your two cows than you do about the theoretical spoils of their grand plans. Call me militant middle class I suppose. Parochial and bourgeois.
My deeper point is that America being set up by Puritans and Quakers who were opposed to hierarchy, aristocracy and a state church has made any form of conservatism much weaker. There is no natural order or right path they can support so they resort to praising ordinary people.
Even in France which has been a republic for 150 years, monarchists provide a structure, the current cabinet has two monarchist ministers.
At a psychological level snobbery is unhealthy part of political structure but it is probably better than unstructured hate, xenophobia or odes to fake folk feeling at building healthy political movements with good immunity against undesirable recruits.
Conservatism is resistance to change. (That doesn't make it wrong necessarily; change can be very bad or stupid.) The US, as you say, came into being from anti-monarchist dissenters so we don't have a 'throne and altar' conservative tradition.
I'm genuinely curious, who are these two monarchist ministers?
Retailleau and Marcangeli.
Dumb white racists have always been, and will always be, a thing. Hopefully, the only metric whereby they are a “huge” thing is BMI.
To even raise issues related to race is to be immediately accused of racism. What the fuck, here goes anyway.
It’s far past time for society to quit pandering to the black community and to demand that it take the lead in correcting the problems it faces. Here are a few suggestions.
There is a systematic lack of respect for education within the community. Tolerance of disruptive students by black school administrators and lack of effective discipline hinders learning in many black majority schools, stifling students’ potential achievement. The simple answer is to expel repeat offenders so that those who desire to learn can learn.
There is a casual acceptance of criminal behavior within the black community that results in a failure to cooperate with police in solving crimes. Until this is reversed there will be zero economic development within areas where they live.
Finally, someone must find a way to make black fathers love and care for their children and especially their boy children. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate fifty times higher than the average American. The lack of a father’s involvement in raising their sons is at the heart of this problem yet no one acknowledges it and seeks answers to it. Where the hell are the black men (and especially black politicians) who even publicly acknowledge this problem? What are they waiting for?
It’s an interesting article, Richard, that you’ve written.
I recently watched a podcast of Barack Obama talking to three retired nfl players. The podcast is called “the pivot”. I’m sure I can pinpoint it if you’d like.
BHO points out that what keeps African Americans grounded is that, no matter how successful they are as individuals, there are people that they love who are struggling to get by.
I am not sure if this is true. All three players nodded in agreement. You get the sense that all of them have carried a number of poorer relations over the years.
Maybe this is the kind of solidarity that happens when blood ties connect the “elite human capital” with the “low human capital”.
> They don’t read and are often religious, though more in a tribal than a truly spiritual sense. The world is frightening to them, and they are hostile to liberals and minorities because they represent uncertainty and change.
I think many people across the political, intellectual, and intelligence spectrum feel that way at times, except perhaps when it comes to reading—though TikTok seems to be influencing young minds everywhere. At best, intelligence can help us cope and guide us through. At worst, it can help justify those feelings and intuitions. It’s interesting to consider what leads some of the most deranged and dangerous intellectuals, on both the right and the left, down this path, while others, hopefully, just bounce around through the turbulence and eventually find their way to smooth gliding.